While I would bend the knee to Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen (Emma D'Arcy), I would not want to attend any of her dinner parties.
In House of the Dragon Season 3, episode 3, Rhaenyra throws a banquet for the nobles of King's Landing. The main course? Cooked rat, served atop an unappetizing black sludge. Not since Arya Stark served Walder Frey his own sons has a Westerosi meal disconcerted me so much. It's pure Game of Thrones-style nastiness, yet this scene doesn't even take place in George R.R. Martin's Fire and Blood.
Initial horror aside, the nobles do deserve it. (And you know what? So did Walder.) Rhaenyra cooked up the rat stunt as retaliation for their treatment of King's Landing's poor. While the city starved as a result of Corlys Velaryon's (Steve Toussaint) blockade, the nobles feasted off the food they had saved up in their store houses. Rhaenyra's rat dinner gives them a taste of the scarcity the smallfolk faced, albeit with some surprisingly stylish plating.The rat feast, it turns out, is also a distraction. While the nobles are in the Red Keep, the Gold Cloaks are seizing their provisions and redistributing them to the city's poor. Later in the episode, Rhaenyra will distribute some of this food herself.
